Presence and IntComm WG

[Elaine Lauerman <>]

Notes from March 3rd

Attendees: Jorj Bauer, Tim Callahan, Ben Fineman, Elaine Lauerman

Tim briefed Ben on the PIC WG activities.

Ben said the Commons is focused on video communication growing into unified communication, more inclusive of

text and chat. 

Tim thinks PIC is a good fit for what Ben is looking for.

We are regrouping right now, there has been a lot of change. Jabber has been deployed across many universities. 

We look at advanced communications.  We help the higher ed market evolve into what we see as a future direction.

Our group has had interesting people that have worked in Jabber, Peter Saint-Andre is a leader in this area.

We offer functionality. We could enable text and chat right away for the Commons.

Jorj

What we are trying to do is talk with members of the community to see if they're interested specific 

applications.  Asterisk server, SIP router between phone and IM, would this be of interest?

Unified video, presence text change, voice and bring together in a meaningful way. Ben has seen mostly proprietary

services. The video part is standards based. The presence and chat side hasn't been interoperable, some are using XMPP 

in their implementations, not sure if its scalable. 

Find a common protocol that we could get wide adoption on has been our focus. The first version were based around SIP.

penn and columbia were recipients of SIP.  We have expertise, but not hours to develop, we are having a hard time finding 

time to work on these things.

Tim - Ben is exploring if it would make sense. Ben's timing is 6 month out before we'd add on. Ben would like

it to add on to their existing services. 

Tim, in the short term we are willing to give the Commons accounts to play with the software.  Our server is running prosody.

Jorj is working with Dan Pritts on getting access to the server again, there were some issues (XMPP servers only). Jorj said 

we are willing to put in a little development effort, but we want to make sure we know what the members need.

Discussed Industry members in the video space, thinking of Polycom, Radvision and Tandberg, Ben may be able to bring them 

into the discussion for unified communications. 

Between now and the SMM we need to discuss items for SMM agenda. Let's shoot for March 17 to have a conversation with the 

vendors.

Cisco bought the Jabber company so we should get Peter on the call. 

Talk about PIC working group strategy, discuss what vendors think unified communications is to them and see if there is a 

common strategy.

Short term, offer something to the Commons, possibly point our Commons subscribers to the PIC working group for more 

information.

EVO is a new industry member they may have XMPP built into their product.